"He Always Wants It Bigger" And Other Things You Should Know About Larry Page

What’s he like? How will his style impact the web’s most important company as it navigates treacherous waters?

Here’s a few things we learned:

Even though Page didn’t order Google’s sting operation of Bing copying its search results, it “exhibit(s) all the hallmarks of the new CEO’s approach to business. It was a creative solution to a sticky problem, it was rooted in data, it was ambitious — and it was prankish to boot.”

Google is moving away from its “let’s hire lots of really smart people and let them do whatever they want” management model. They want to be more like Android, where a bunch of really smart guys do what one really smart guy wants. (In the case of Android, it’s Andy Rubin.)

Brian Kennish, a Google engineer from 2003 to late 2010 says: “this system worked really well until the company reached about 10,000 workers. After that, things started to break down.”

The goal of Chrome isn’t so much to gain marketshare but to spur other browser makers to innovate. With Microsoft putting IE6 out of its misery and releasing the well-regarded IE9, that seems to be a success. (Chrome’s 10% marketshare is nothing to sneeze at, though.)

We already knew it, but data dominates everything at Google.

An anecdote that highlights Page’s focus on data: Google sales boss Nikesh Arora says he told Page “I’d gotten back from nine cities in 12 days — Munich, Copenhagen, Davos, Zurich, New Delhi, Bombay, London, San Francisco. There’s a silence for five seconds. And then he’s like, ‘That’s only eight.’ “

A corollary of this data focus is that Page gets lots of respect from Googlers for easily admitting he’s wrong when proved wrong with data.

Google realises its maniacal focus on data can be a drawback in creating “wow” products like Apple. They’re trying to square that circle by adding data later into the design process. Matias Duarte, who designed the well-regarded user interface on WebOS and now works on Android says: “We don’t design by committee; we don’t design by focus group… But we do verify everything we’re trying to do with our design with stringent, large-scale user testing.”

A good point: one thing that Google has going for it in the design area is its whimsy, as shown by its Google doodles and April’s Fools pranks.

On Google’s inability to make social software: “Jamie Zawinski, one of the legends of the free-software movement, once famously quipped that the most important question for anyone writing social software should be, How will this software get my users laid?”

Google advertises on Bing! They have the top paid keyword for “search engine.”

Google’s secret: “When people come to Larry with ideas, he always wants it bigger,” says one ex-Googler.

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